Pokemon archeologist travels 12 hours to reunite a 17-year-old Diamond save file with the player who was forced to sell the barely functional, chewed cartridge after his partner's car wreck

YouTuber Purple Thunder has spent years creating videos about Pokemon save file archeology – buying up old, used cartridges and seeing what kinds of discoveries these old save files hold. The latest find is perhaps the most heartwarming, though, as Purple Thunder has just reunited a 17-year-old, 300-hour Pokemon Diamond save file with its original owner, who never wanted to part with it in the first place.

As Purple Thunder explains in a recent video, he picked up a copy of Pokemon Diamond on eBay which was somewhat discounted from its usual second-hand price. While the game was complete, it was also full of holes. Literally, there were a bunch of holes punched through the DS cart. But the cartridge was advertised as working, and sure enough, despite looking like a mess the cart booted on Purple Thunder's DS. Eventually.

The save itself wasn't terribly remarkable, aside from the fact that it had been thoroughly played, with nearly 300 hours recorded by a player named "Marcus" since the June 30, 2008 start date. Still, Purple Thunder made a video about it, and was eventually contacted by someone claiming to be Marcus.

Now, Purple Thunder says he receives messages from trolls claiming to be the original owners of these saves all the time, so he set to work grilling this supposed Marcus on the contents of the file. The responses were understandably shaky – I know I'd struggle to remember every detail of my childhood Pokemon saves – but the alleged Marcus did provide some apparent details on how the cart got those holes in.

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"I was in the process of moving my Pokemon over" to a newer generation, Marcus explained, "when my little shih tzu dog I had at the time named Scrappy got a hold of the game and I couldn't get it working anymore. I thought they were just all lost and I had kept the game for memories at that point."

The other details were enough to get Purple Thunder to take a pretty ridiculous chance: flying from Europe to a small town in Alabama to meet Marcus in person. "What dumbass travels 12 hours to meet a guy they don't know to talk about a 20-year-old Pokemon game?" he asks at one point in the video. Well, Purple Thunder did meet Marcus at a gently decaying Alabama mall, and pretty quickly became confident that he is, indeed, the real deal.

"My wife, we had been married about a year at the time, she had a real bad car wreck that completely totaled the car," Marcus explained at the meetup. "She was out of work. My work actually fired me for leaving early to go to a hospital to check on her, because I worked at a factory at the time and you're replaceable at that kind of place."

He continues, "My Pokemon games were about $1,800 worth of games. I ended up pawning them with every attention to get them all back to help cover bills till we got back on our feet. I don't know where he went from his store. I'm thinking he sold them probably to old game stores and they went who knows where."

So the old cartridges scattered to the winds before Marcus got the chance to reclaim them from the pawn shop, and he only managed to be reunited with this one thanks to his stumbling upon Purple Thunder's previous YouTube video.

"You never know what can happen," Marcus says. "You might be like me and getting rid of them. Have to have hard times, lose your collection, stuff like that, or have to sell it to make by. Who knows? Things have a funny way of coming full circle sometimes."

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